Heroism or Reality
by DSieya
Summary: When she was younger, Hermione dreamed of heroes. [rhr, oneshot, happy valentines day!, written before dh]


_happy valentines', everybody! mine sucked, but i sitll managed to churn out something, er, happy. (i could have so easily not made it happy. xD) _

anyhow. yay for my twentieth story. :)

* * *

She would read children's books and watch Saturday morning television, contemplating as two perfect people fell in love. It was the expected, the wonderful, the beautiful. 

-

Primary school was a sharp dip into reality, where boys weren't the chivalrous knights she would so intently focus on during her shows; they would pull her hair and make fun of her braces. Then she realized that perhaps heroes were only created for cartoons.

-

She met a hero – a real, live hero – when she was almost twelve years old. Except he seemed more like a boy than a hero and that confused her. Still – she thought that perhaps she could love this hero and her world would make sense again.

-

Try hard as she might, she was unable to fall in love with that particular hero.

Well, she fell in love with him. Just not the way that the women from her cartoons would. It didn't upset her, not much, because it wasn't as if she was burning with a secret passion for him and was trying to hide it from everyone else.

(There was really not anything right about _that_, she decided.)

-

One day, she found herself looking at his Sidekick who no one would ever characterize as a Hero.

-

But he turned out to be much too brash, much too temperamental. She found – well, it wasn't love, but something close to a _really-like_, in another sort of hero. He was strange and exotic and a very sweet person, but sometimes she would just start glaring at the sidekick as if it was all his fault.

She didn't even know what he was being blamed for, and that scared her.

-

She was almost sixteen when she made the decision that 'Sidekick' was too demeaning of a word and it didn't quite do the character justice.

(Han did save Luke, after all.)

-

... Yes, it was much too demeaning of a word. Especially after _that_. The two boys she loved most could have died.

(She finally admitted to herself that she loved the Sidekick.

Admitting it to him will be a different story.)

-

She realized that this would be the hardest thing for her to do.

-

And him doing _that_ didn't make things very much easier. She wondered, many a time, if perhaps she could give up on the Sidekick and go back to the Hero.

But she realized that impossible. She was already queasy enough thinking about _him_ with _her_, she didn't need to clinch the deal and think about herself with her other boy.

She believes that perhaps he had found love in someone else already. (That damn family...!)

-

She told him. It was during a battle, and she thought, _better now than never_, and straight-out told him.

Then they had to duck the curse that was flying their way.

-

It was war, now, and as three they were too busy with heroics to have any time for love. It was almost ironic.

Heroism seemed to be somewhat overrated.

-

She wondered why she still thought of him as the Sidekick. He may have not have been the Chosen, but he was still a Hero.

-

Screw heroism, anyway.

_This is much better_, she thought, his long arms looped around her.

-

(It was the expected, the wonderful, the beautiful.)

-

She thought that perhaps He (the one whose name always reminded her of a bumble bee) may have been right. He was always right (well, almost always, that one time of being wrong had killed Him).

Their love between them was stronger than ever and Hermione believed that they really may have had a chance of winning this.

-

She waited for his signal...

waited...  
waited...  
Spells burst out everywhere, in vibrant and menacing flashes of light, and something long and heavy fell dead behind her, and then there was a bright flash of green and red, and an orb and a string and everyone watched in awe.

She, dirty and grimy, gripped his (_the Chosen_) shoulder and made sure that he knew she loved him; he severed the silver connection; it felt like an explosion, and she was blown off her feet as the vacuumed air suddenly started to compress again, and her already wild hair now started to resemble a jungle.

At first, there were Seven – they had destroyed the Last. Her heart was near ready to explode with joy and then she saw him – not the Chosen, but the Hero, her Hero, spread-eagled on the ground.

-

He wasn't dead. Fate and love wasn't that cruel to her. He did, however, spend a good deal of time unconscious and an even greater deal of time too weak for his patience to effectively deal with.

But he did get better. It may not seem like it at times, because old hurts _do _come back... but if the baby with little wisps of auburn hair in her hands was anything to judge by, then yes, he definitely got better.

Sometimes she would read the child those little children's books with princesses, knights, dragons; _you know_, those made solely for children full of fake and cheesy heroism.

But it was a good start.

**THE END**


End file.
